Firefox world loses Web dev guru to Chrome | Deep Tech - CNET News:

Dion Almaer, who had worked on developer tools at Mozilla earlier in his career, noted the significance of [the lead Firebug programmer in 2011, John J.] Barton's new job in a blog post today.

"Firebug used to be the way you debugged your sites, but that is changed," Almaer said. "It is too early to claim that Firebug is zombied, but all eyes will be on that...especially as we see other browser tools continue to blossom."
I'm often a "if it's not broken, don't fix it" kind of guy (not a huge limitation, since my threshold for entering "broken" state is horribly low), and have been using Firebug as my first-line tester for years.  I mean, heck, my code has to work in Firefox, so at worst, I'm only losing time that Firebug is worse than Chrome's tools (and that Firefox is slower than Chrome).  That is, code has to work somewhere first.  Why not Firefox?

But recently, I've heard too many good things from Chrome-first guys about Chrome's tools, have noticed that our app works insanely quicker in Chrome than Firefox, and am getting a little tired of seeing the "Warning: Enabling the Script panel causes a Firefox slow-down due to a platform bug. This will be fixed with the next major Firefox and Firebug versions," error at the top of my Firebug console.  I usually use Chrome when hitting our production testing server, and thought maybe it was time to test it as my dev choice instead.

(And, honestly, I had some trouble with Chrome keeping its cache clean/empty when I last tried -- even when set to no cache, it would occasionally cache jive, which made it much too easy to waste time testing there.)

When Googling how to transition from Firebug to Chrome's tools, I ran across the above post.  That's kinda strange -- I haven't felt Firebug was horrible, though I think I've seen a native Firefox equivalent pop up sometimes when I hit the "right wrong" key combination.

Anyhow, this is just to say I need to catch up with the state of browser debugging.  Firebug is great, but it's probably past time to come up for air and see if the transition cost to something else isn't worth it.

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